Soundings

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Summer 1994

Faced with
environmental concerns and the rising cost of garbage disposal,
municipalities are looking for ways to encourage recycling and reduce the
amount of garbage their residents produce. Seattle pioneered the practice of
charging by the bag for garbage collected. Households buy stickers to paste
onto each garbage bag, and waste collectors only pick up bags bearing a
sticker. But a study of “per-unit charges” indicates that bag fees are not as
effective as they may appear.

Researchers Don Fullerton of Carnegie Mellon University and Thomas
Kinnaman of the University of Virginia note that the households they studied
tended to stuff significantly more trash into each bag, somewhat undercutting
the pay-by-the-bag programs goal of cutting down the total amount of
garbage. Fullerton and Kinnaman studied 75 households in Charlottesville,
Virginia, both before and after the institution of an eighty-cent fee for
every 32-gallon bag of garbage collected. They found that the average
household reduced its volume of trash by 37 percent, but the weight of
the garbage fell by only 14 percent.

Furthermore, the researchers estimated that illegal disposal accounted for
more than one-quarter of the total reduction in household trash.
Charlottesville residents slipped some of their garbage into dumpsters on the
University of Virginia campus or behind commercial establishments downtown.
Fullerton and Kinnaman predict even more dumpster-stuffing and illegal
littering in a large, heterogeneous city such as New York.